Pass through airport security with this implanted NFC chip

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Andreas Sjöström,vice president for digital practice at Sogeti, a multinational IT consulting company, created a bit of a buzz earlier this month — he released a YouTube video that showed how he went through a Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) boarding gate by tapping his left hand on an NFC (Near Field Communication) reader. Wanting to learn more, we contacted him to learn more details about his experiment.

Dangerous Things xNT NFC tag

Andreas used a commercially available NFC implant from Dangerous Things, which includes a preloaded syringe to inject the glass-enclosed NFC chip. The NFC Type 2 compliant chipset is encased in a 2-by-12-millimeter glass cylinder. A medical professional carried out the implantation procedure. You can see how the procedure was carried out by watching the segment near the end of the video below. (NOTE: If you are squeamish about such things, stop the video before you reach the 7 minute 55 second mark.)

Andreas claims that the topical anesthetic made the implantation process a painless one. Weeks after having it implanted, he says he doesn’t notice it under the skin.

While Andreas is not the first person to to implant an NFC chip, he is, to our knowledge, the first person to pass through airport security and board a plane using only the NFC chip as identification. Scandinavian Airlines worked with him to embed encrypted digital data, which its system could work with. Beyond that, he didn’t make any special arrangement with the airline to test the concept out. The video below is of the second time he used the NFC for this process, as he didn’t want to raise too much attention to the experiment the first time by having someone follow him recording video.

He was able to pass through the airport security checkpoint in Stockholm Sweden — which, like the U.S.’s TSA, is completely separate from the airline’s systems — along with the SAS airline lounge and boarding gate, all by using the the implanted NFC chip.

The airline itself is not planning to offer NFC implants as a product for its customers. This is, thus far, a one-time proof-of-concept that both Andreas and the airline used as a learning experiment. Andreas wanted to use NFC to go through a real-life scenario using an existing operational system (airline boarding in his case) to generate questions and new ideas about how an implanted NFC chip might be used in other real-life situations. The goal is to learn valuable uses of new technology, by using it in a way that generates useful questions.

Andreas does not have any specific “next project” planned for his implanted NFC chip. However, you can be sure that whatever he does next will be something equally fascinating.

If you are interested, you can listen to our entire discussion using the web podcast player below.

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